SU Material Organization

Hi everyone.

I am curious what are the best strategies or practices for organizing materials in Sketchup. Usually, as I am working on a project I am quite organized about my material naming and might only have a dozen or fewer materials I am working with, as seen in “Colours In Model”.

But eventually, as I populate a model with various components of the 3D warehouse all that goes out the window as they often have a plethora of materials embedded in them, now being imported into my model. endless shades of grey, duplicates (or nearly identical materials), materials that aren’t even being used etc etc. 50 materials for this car, 75 materials for this refrigerator, so on. And probably no logic in how those materials are being labeled. It all becomes a mess, with the dozen or so materials I am actually working with being scattered across the “colors in model” browser.

This can be annoying to go through as I am using v-ray editor and the material list of names is just a disaster.

To make things slightly easier I try to name all my materials with a consistent prefix (eg. arch_concrete, arch_wood siding, arch_glass etc.) so they at least all list together in the v-ray asset window.

In an ideal world, there would be subfolders corresponding to the component when importing models, as I am less interested in having to re-organize, relabel them, simply, etc as I am not usually working/modifying with these imported materials directly.

Summary: Is there an ideal way to manage materials coming from 3D warehouse components? What are other people’s strategies?

Thanks!

  • running Sketchup 2018 pro on latest macOS, with vray 3.6

I try to gut files from 3D warehouse whenever I can…Have you tried Material Tools extension? https://extensions.sketchup.com/en/content/material-tools
This lets you quickly wipe all materials from a model, then you can re-apply from your library so both style and naming conventions are the way you want them.

Yes, best is to open the 3D warehouse file in a new instance of SketchUp and investigate.
Get rid of materials you do not need etc. simplify the nesting level or geometry. Sometimes, I just copy the part which I need and then move along…

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I am also interested. What is the best method to organize materials. Is it good to create huge material library in template?

I am have only most used materials in template, and organized folders with textures.